Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Tuesday May 31, 2011 @03:10PM
from the shiny-things-sell-best dept.

arcticstoat writes with an interview in bit-tech "AMD's manager of Fusion software marketing Terry Makedon revealed that 'AMD as a company made a very, very big bet when it purchased ATI: that things like OpenCL will succeed. I mean, we're betting everything on it.' He also added: 'I'll give you the fact that we don't have any major applications at this point that are going to revolutionize the industry and make people think "oh, I must have this," granted, but we're working very hard on it. Like I said, it's a big bet for us, and it's a bet that we're certain about.'"

The odds of AMD inventing unicorns and saving the company with their sale are better than I'd give the idea that OpenCL will become popular.

I work with databases all day, and we regularly get people who say "why can't you accelerate sorting using a GPU?" The reason why you can't is that by the time you transmit the whole problem set over to the GPU, wait for it to compute, and then transfer the results back to the CPU again, you could have just sorted it on the CPU. This problem, that you have to load/process/return everything from the GPU, only goes away if they are capable of running much more general software. I'd have to move the entire database query executor onto the GPU, and it would need enough memory to do significant tasks, before it made sense here.

I see OpenCL continuing to be more popular in scientific computing applications, making far less nodes required in the computing clusters they tend to run. It's hard to imagine another area they have any real potential to be popular in.

I have a great tip for Terry,invest a little money in blender foundation: http://blender.org .They are working on new renderer based on CUDA,with just a little support this renderer could work on openCL.Existence of a free and open source openCL renderer of professional quality would force closed source developers to develop GPU based renderers as well or lose customers.You can even invest in secret , there are other sustantial supporters of the blender foundation whose identity is not given.